Muslims and Liberals

St. Louis Post Dispatch
September 2, 1999

ETHNIC STRIFE

GERMAN peacekeepers stopped a car in southeastern Kosovo one day recently, “Your identification papers, please!” one of them said, stepping toward the car.

Three passengers pulled out pistols and started shooting at the Germans. Luckily, only one bullet hit a soldier whose flak jacket spared him any injury.

NATO peacekeepers were shot at in other places by ethnic Albanians who resent the alliance’s efforts to protect minority Serbs. Keeping Kosovo ethnically mixed is a key NATO mission. British Prime Minister Tony Blair repeated this mission during his recent visit to Pristina, as had President Bill Clinton.

It looks as if they are fighting a lost battle. More than 160,000 of the 200,000 Kosovar Serbs have fled Kosovo, and the exodus continues. Even those Serbs who are staying behind are hardly part of a pluralist society.

“The towns that were predominantly Serb are now all Serb,” said Brig. Gen. John Craddock, the outgoing commander of U.S. peacekeepers in southeast Kosovo. “The towns that were predominantly Albanian are now all Albanian.”

Clinton and Blair apparently are too used to their variety of “civic” nations in which people’s ethnic identity is secondary to their citizenship. The ball game is different where people are loyal primarily to their ethnic or religious groups and call them “nations.” Ethnic nations often cleanse themselves of minorities.

I was born into a Muslim family in India’s Assam state when Muslims there were demanding a partition of India to create their “national” homeland, Pakistan. My father followed Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu, in opposing the partition. When Pakistan was created anyway, our Hindu neighbors in the new Indian republic grabbled some of our property and made a landfill out of the Muslim graveyard where my grandparents were buried. Some of my father’s Hindu friends started avoiding him.

We resettled on our ancestral farm in Polashpur, East Pakistan, where Hindus and Muslims had lived peacefully for centuries. But anti-Hindu riots broke out there and most Hindus around Polashpur and Pakistan fled to India.

YEARS later ethnic Bengalis in East Pakistan started the Bangladesh “nationalist” movement and seceded from West Pakistan. Bangladesh has since cleansed itself of its Urdu-speaking ethnic minority.

The neighbors of Kosovo, as I saw last year, have gone through the same cleansing process in the wake of nationalist movements. Greeks who had lived in Turkey through seven centuries of Ottoman imperial rule were expelled en masse. Many of them have resettled in deserted Muslim homes in Greece, which drove away most of its Muslims.

Pyla, a village in the buffer zone between north and south Cyprus, is an especially instructive example. North Cyprus has gotten rid of its Greek Cypriot minority after the south chased away its Turkish Cypriots. The United Nations wanted to set an example of ethnic pluralism, and persuaded Pyla’s 400 or so Turkish Cypriots to stay with their 800 Greek Cypriots neighbors.

The two communities live as neighbors all right; but unlike in earlier times, they shop in separate grocery stores, eat in separate restaurants, and belong to separate social clubs. And when a Greek and a Turkish Cypriot run into one another, they don’t say hello, which they used to do until the “age of ethnic nationalism” triggered inter-ethnic riots in Cyprus in the mid-1960s.

Even if NATO could keep those Kosovar Serbs from fleeing, Kosovo would at best have become a big Pyla. More likely, it would have turned into a communal inferno. For the same reason, the alliance should rethink its plans to keep Kosovo part of Serbia. Let the Kosovars, through their elected representatives, decide their political future. Just about every other ethnic nation in the Balkans has done so. Any constitutional plan th at doesn’t have the support of the Kosovars could turn Kosovo into a quagmire for NATO.